Five annual one and a half day research conferences are proposed on contemporary scientific issues of relevance to understanding and treating communication disorders. Each conference will be held during the annual ASHA meeting (rather than prior to ASHA, as in the past) and will begin with a basic tutorial in order to increase attendance, particularly by students, including minority students. The goal of the conferences is to increase the exposure to and understanding of scientific findings by speech-language clinicians, students, and clinical researchers, and conversely to increase researchers' knowledge about and interest in clinically relevant issues. An additional goal is to foster interactions between the basic researchers who will speak at the conferences and the more clinically- oriented attendees, to the mutual benefit of both groups. This will be achieved through an opening tutorial by a well-known researcher, a combination of panel discussions, participant interaction small-group sessions, and more informal mechanisms such as lunches and a final reception. A program of minority travel fellowships will support the attendance of 10 minority students at each conference. Minority fellows will give poster presentations at the conference for which they receive support. The specific topics to be addressed in the conference sessions, and the speakers to be invited, will be determined by a conference steering committee consisting of the PI, Herbert Baum (director of ASHA), Judith Lauter (University of Oklahoma), Kimberly Fisher (Northwestern University), Sharon Kujawa and Eleana Plante (both of the University of Arizona). General topics for each conference have been selected already: 1) "Feedback and Executive control in Human communication" (Fall, 1997); 2) "Infant-Toddler Development" (1998); 3) "Plasticity and Functional Reorganization: Implications for communication Sciences and Disorders" (1999); 4) "Imaging 2000" (2000); 5) "Focus on the Individual: A New paradigm for the Next Millennium" (2001). Session topics and speakers have already been selected for the 1997 conference. They include an opening tutorial lecture by Charles Berlin (Kresge Hearing Research Center, Louisiana) and talks on feedback control in the auditory periphery (Charles Liberman, Harvard and Eaton-Peabody laboratory), kinesthetic feedback modulation of speech motor performance (Steven Barlow, Indiana University), cross-modal influences on speech motor control (Charles Larson, Northwestern University), and executive function and feedback control (Emmanuel Donchin, University of Illinois). Possible session topics and speakers for the second conference include development of speech-motor control (C. Boliek), early development of phnology (L. Olswang), prelinguistic and early linguistic aspects of communication (R. Paul), infants at risk of communication disorders (D. Thal), infant hearing evaluation (L. Werner), and infant-toddler language intervention (M. J. Wilcox). Annual funding is requested for travel, expenses and modest honoraria for five speakers, travel allowances for 10 minority students (PH.D./M.D. student,